T w e n t y S i d e d

At fifteen minutes I was running my mouth and managed to mangle the point I was making. When you have one of those moments where you’re free to roam around and talk to everyone, the game doesn’t usually make you talk to everyone. You can often ignore people. That’s nice, although it’s not the same thing as all conversations being optional, which is kind of how I made it sound.

I made a fuss over the facial animation system, but it’s entirely possible that it’s only impressive because the art style is so… uh… stylized. The animations might not actually be better than a Bethesda / BioWare style face animation, but it looks better because it’s happening on a cartoon face and not on a photorealistic one. In any case, it really makes these conversations come to life.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

What if you took the choice and conversation wheel gameplay of (say) Dragon Age or Mass Effect, and made that into a game all by itself? No shooter combat. No classes. No equipment. You just talk and make decisions. The whole time.

Telltale Games has done it, and the result is basically a new genre of videogame. Yes, on the surface it’s mechanically similar to Sam & Max or the Strongbad adventure games. But making it a serious, drama-based story with gut-wrenching choices creates a very different experience.

The game is based on the Comic series by Robert Kirkman, and features brief cameos of existing characters. There’s also a TV series based on the same material, which I hated because it’s way too much a soap opera of idiots and jackasses. I watched the first several episodes and didn’t connect with a single character.

The entire Spoiler Warning cast has played through the game by this point. I realize the game is a bit “new” by the standards of our show, but this is an important game and we all have stuff to say about it. If you’re looking to play along at home, the game is available right now on Steam for less than $20. It’s an innovative high-quality game that weighs in around twelve to fifteen hours. I punch those numbers into my calculator and it makes a happy face.

We normally take a couple of weeks off from Spoiler Warning when we finish a season, but we’re rolling straight into The Walking Dead. Buckle up.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.